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Romulus Linney, Wide-Ranging Playwright, Dies at 80

Romulus Linney, a playwright who roved along many intellectual paths, exploring the Southern Appalachian culture of his upbringing, refashioning classical works for modern times and adapting contemporary novels for the stage, died on Saturday at home in Germantown, N.Y. He was 80 and also had a home in Manhattan.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Laura Callanan.

Though he never achieved the popularity or fame of playwrights like Edward Albee, Horton Foote and Neil Simon — only one of his plays was performed on Broadway — Mr. Linney was a leading light in the more remote firmament of Off Broadway and regional theater. The Signature Theater Company in New York, which devotes full seasons to presenting the work of a single playwright, acknowledged this in 1991, when it chose Mr. Linney to be the first writer it would spotlight. He is the father of the actress Laura Linney.

His work was redolent of artistic seriousness but nonetheless intended to entertain, and he often spoke in interviews about the need for dialogue to help propel a story and not simply to explore ideas. He wrote more than 30 plays, many of them one-acts, some comic, some somber, wide-ranging in theme and content and often steeped in literary and historical references.

“In terms of scope of ambition, Mr. Linney may be our bravest living playwright,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times in 1996, “running from rural dramas about hillbilly homicides to lush meditations on Lord Byron’s ghost and Frederick the Great.”

Mr. Brantley was referring to some of Mr. Linney’s better-known works: “True Crimes” (1996), a gothic tale of lust, greed and murder set in Appalachia in 1900 that draws on a 19th-century episode in Russia that Tolstoy wrote about as well; “Childe Byron” (1977), which imagines barbed encounters between the poet Lord Byron and his estranged daughter, and for which Mr. Linney said he drew on memories of his divorce and his separation from his elder daughter, Laura, who was then a child; and “The Sorrows of Frederick” (1966), a sweeping meditation on the benevolent and malign strains of influence that flow from father to son, drawn from the life of Frederick II, the 18th-century king of Prussia.

Mr. Linney was one of many who adapted Dickens’s fable “A Christmas Carol” for the stage. His play “Unchanging Love” was a version of Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine,” about the jealousy, rivalry and greed that undermine a village family, set in North Carolina of the 1920s.

He also adapted a couple of contemporary novels: “A Lesson Before Dying,” Ernest J. Gaines’s potent tale of a man unjustly sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit and the teacher who helps him face his fate; and “Going After Cacciato,” Tim O’Brien’s powerfully fanciful Vietnam War story featuring the dream journey of a soldier who goes AWOL, determined to walk to Paris.

Photo

Romulus LinneyCredit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Linney wrote plays about August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Delmore Schwartz and the poet Anna Akhmatova. He wrote about the Nuremberg trials and the Vietnam War. His sole foray onto Broadway, “The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks,” concerned a bizarre crime committed in the name of opposition to the war policy of President Richard M. Nixon; it fared poorly, closing after five performances in 1972.

And he wrote about the rural South in plays like “Heathen Valley,” about a 19th-century Episcopal bishop bringing the word of God to a remote region of North Carolina, which he adapted from one of his own novels; “Holy Ghosts,” set among a sect of snake handlers; and “Love Drunk,” which was among his last works, about a 60-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman engaged in a creepy mutual seduction in a remote cabin.

“A Southern childhood is a very primal thing,” Mr. Linney said in a 1987 interview. “I think Katherine Anne Porter said that what happens to you after you’re 10 years old doesn’t matter very much, but the things that happen before you were 10 matter a great deal.”

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Romulus Zachariah Linney IV — his great-grandfather was a North Carolina congressman — was born on Sept. 21, 1930, in Philadelphia and grew up to the age of 13 largely in the South. His family lived in Boone, N.C., and Madison, Tenn., and when his father, a doctor, died, young Romulus moved with his mother to Washington.

He graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, spent two years in the Army and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing at the Yale School of Drama. He began his career writing prose fiction and published two novels in the 1960s; besides “Heathen Valley” there was “Slowly by Thy Hand Unfurled,” written in the form of a diary by an uneducated 19th-century woman. In 1980 he published “Jesus Tales,” a collection of related stories.

Mr. Linney’s first two marriages, to Ann Leggett and Margaret Jane Andrews, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Ms. Callanan, whom he married in 1996, and his daughter Laura, who lives in Connecticut, he is survived by another daughter, Susan Linney, of Brooklyn.

Mr. Linney spent many years teaching writing at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College and Brooklyn College, among other schools. In a 1989 interview he was asked if it troubled him that he had never become a playwright with the name recognition or the New York cachet of, say, David Mamet or Sam Shepard.

“It’s been frustrating,” he acknowledged, though he added that he would continue writing even if his plays were never produced at all.

“When this is all over, my writing will add up to the sum total of me,” he said. “The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny. It’s a question of finding that central thing that’s yours to say and yours alone.”

Correction: January 19, 2011

A picture caption on Monday with an obituary about the playwright Romulus Linney misstated the given name of one of the actors shown in a production of his play “The Unwritten Song.” He is Paco Tolson, not Poco.

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2011, on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Romulus Linney Dies at 80;
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